The basement in the Weavers' District didn't just smell of damp earth and coal soot; it smelled of unfinished business.
Kael leaned against the rusted, sweat-slicked surface of an industrial boiler, his chest heaving in a rhythm that wasn't entirely his own. With every inhalation, he felt a sharp, crystalline friction deep in his lungs, as if he were breathing in powdered glass. He coughed, and the sound was wet—not with blood, but with the rattling, hollow noise of a failing machine. A spray of fine, grey metallic flakes fluttered from his lips, glowing with a dim, dying luminescence before dissolving into static before they could hit the grime-covered floor.
His stability was a jagged cliff-edge. At thirty-eight percent, the world was no longer a solid place. It was a poorly rendered simulation, struggling to maintain its resolution against the void in his chest.
His vision was the first thing to fail. The Blueprint overlay had fused with his retinas, refusing to disengage even when he clamped his eyes shut. He didn't see the boiler as an object; he saw the pressure-stress lines, the thinning iron at the base, and the exact geometric coordinates of the steam valves. The world was stripped of color, replaced by a neon-blue wireframe that pulsed in time with his racing heart. When he closed his eyes, the wireframe remained, burned into the darkness of his eyelids—a haunting skeleton of a reality he was no longer allowed to inhabit fully.
"Kael? Hey, stay with me. You're... you're flickering again."
Jonas's voice arrived with a sickening latency. It was a lagging echo, arriving seconds after his lips had finished moving, sounding like a broadcast from a different room.
Kael turned his head toward the sound. To his eyes, Jonas was a jittering mess of low-resolution textures, his face a blur of flesh-tones that couldn't quite decide on a shape. The only sharp, high-definition thing in the room was the gold-and-blue interface of the Ironclad Vanguard pulsing over Jonas's shoulder. It was a mark of someone who belonged to the design.
"I'm... fine," Kael said.
But as the words left his mouth, a cold shiver of dread ran down his spine. He didn't recognize the cadence of his own voice. It had lost its soft, adolescent rasp, replaced by a clipped, rhythmic precision—the tone of a man who had spent decades barking orders over the roar of a battlefield. It was the Legionnaire echo, taking advantage of the stability drop to test the boundaries of Kael's throat. Kael heard the change, but at thirty-eight percent, the boundary between himself and the ghosts was becoming a suggestion.
Jonas flinched, stepping back until his boots crunched on a pile of coal dust. "Kael, you sound... you sound like a stranger. Stop it."
"The perimeter is unsecured," Kael snapped. He stood up with a mechanical fluidity that shouldn't have been possible for a boy whose ribs had been cracked only hours prior. He didn't think about standing; he simply found himself upright, his spine a rigid line of steel.
He walked to the far corner of the basement, his movements sharp and calculated. He stood in a rigid, military parade-rest, hands locked behind the small of his back, staring at a blank, soot-stained stone wall. It was a habit from a life he had never lived—a piece of data from a past life he shouldn't have possessed, currently overwriting his muscles.
"Kael, look at me," Jonas whispered, his voice trembling. "The Inquisitors aren't here. It's just us."
Kael didn't hear him. The audio latency was getting worse. Jonas's words were becoming a slurry of white noise. In the silence of Kael's mind, the Legionnaire was much louder.
Sector Seven is compromised. The vanguard has fallen. You are the last line.
"Kael!" Jonas reached out, his hand moving toward Kael's shoulder.
Kael spun.
He didn't make a conscious choice to attack. His body reacted to the "threat" with the lethal efficiency of a trained killer. His hand blurred, fingers locking around Jonas's throat with a crushing grip before the other boy could raise his shield. There was no anger in Kael's eyes—only a cold, tactical vacancy. To Kael, Jonas wasn't a friend; he was an undefined variable that had entered his combat radius.
Target neutralized, the Legionnaire hissed in the back of his mind.
"Kael... it's... me..." Jonas choked, his shield interface flaring as it tried to activate. The blue light of the Ironclad Vanguard reflected off Kael's wide, staring pupils.
Kael blinked. The wireframe in his vision spasmed, the blue lines turning a violent, glitching red. The face of the Desperate Father flashed across Jonas's features for a split second—a memory overlap.
He let go.
Kael stumbled back, his hand trembling as it returned to a human shape. He looked at his own palms as if they were alien tools. "I... the air is too loud, Jonas. I can't hear the floor. Everything is vibrating."
He slumped back against the boiler, the grey static rising in his throat again. The world was beginning to lose its solidity. The stone walls felt like paper; the floor beneath him felt like a mere suggestion of matter. He was drifting away from the definition of Kael Arden, dissolving into the shared memories of the ghosts he carried.
Then, the basement door creaked.
No sound of footsteps followed. No shift in the air signaled an intruder. But suddenly, the metronomic, heavy ticking of the Legionnaire's thoughts in Kael's head simply... stopped.
Nox stepped into the dim, amber light of the single gas lamp. She didn't look at Jonas, and she didn't offer Kael a hand. She didn't offer a single word of comfort. She simply sat on a rusted crate three paces away, her bare feet dangling over the edge.
The effect was instantaneous.
The wireframe lines in Kael's vision collapsed, retreating back into his optic nerves. The boiler became solid iron again—cold, hard, and real. The lagging echo of Jonas's panicked breathing finally synced up with the physical movement of his chest. Most importantly, the cold, military urge to stand at attention vanished, replaced by a bone-deep, human ache.
Kael's voice returned to its soft, teenage rasp. "The static... it's gone."
He didn't look at Nox. He didn't feel a rush of warmth or a surge of sentiment. He simply felt the sudden, blessed absence of the "Other." For the first time since the Clocktower fell, the boundaries of his skin felt real again. He wasn't a composite of ghosts; he was just a boy in a basement. The pressure that had been squeezing his brain released, leaving behind a hollow peace.
"You're late," Kael muttered, his head lolling against the rusted metal. The exhaustion he had been suppressing hit him like a physical blow.
"I was never coming," Nox replied softly. Her voice was the only thing in the room that didn't sound like it was being processed through the Mnemosyne Network. It was analog. It possessed a weight that made the space around her feel more real than the rest of the city.
"Then why are you here?" Jonas asked, his voice shaking as he rubbed his throat.
Nox didn't answer him. She watched Kael as his eyes began to close, his breathing finally falling into a natural, messy rhythm.
"The Architect is recalculating," she said, her voice seemingly addressed to the shadows. "It doesn't like the silence you created. It is trying to fill the gap with noise."
Kael didn't hear her. He was already falling into a sleep that had no dreams, no echoes, and no history. Near her, the System couldn't reach him. Near her, he was finally allowed to be nothing.
Jonas sat on the floor, his back against the opposite wall, watching the two of them. He looked at Kael, whose skin was no longer flickering with grey static, and then at the girl who sat in the dark like an impossible paradox.
He looked at his own interface, glowing faintly at 18%.
For the first time in his life, Jonas felt the weight of his own inheritance. He felt the Centurion and the Vanguard pressing against his skull, demanding he be a hero, demanding he protect his charge. But looking at Kael and Nox, he realized that he was the one bound to a script.
"What is he?" Jonas asked Nox, his voice a low whisper.
Nox turned her head. Her eyes, empty as a midnight sky, fixed on Jonas. "He is the question," she said.
"And you?"
Nox tilted her head, a small, unsettling movement. "I am the reason there is no answer."
The gas lamp flickered once, the flame struggling against the lack of oxygen in the cramped basement. Outside, the sounds of the Weavers' District continued—the distant hiss of steam pipes and the rhythmic, terrifying thud of Inquisitor boots two streets over.
They were searching for a boy who didn't exist, in a city that was slowly realizing it was a cage.
Kael's stability remained at a fragile thirty-eight percent, a flickering number in a broken UI. But for tonight, the static was silent. For tonight, the funeral of the living was postponed.